The Lone Sysadmin

I’m glad to see the iPad is announced. It looks like an interesting device, not quite a notebook, not quite an iPhone. I, however, don’t see how it’s anything beyond a portal to give Apple more money.

Please, if you see I’ve made an error here let me know in the comments. Thank you!

1. AT&T. Seriously, a “breakthrough” deal with AT&T is like being the fastest reader in remedial reading class. You’re still in remedial reading class.

2. No Flash. It’s astonishing how much stuff I watch in Flash on my laptop, and it being missing on this device is going to be a big hole. Lots of stuff is in YouTube, but not everything, and HTML5 isn’t going to solve this problem for quite a while, either.

3. You still need a desktop to dock this thing to, for anything beyond basic downloading or web browsing. Despite what some apps can do (including iWork), it really is just a standalone viewer of content.

4. The dock and keyboard setup is a kludge. It appears clunky, certainly not easily portable, and looks like it’ll fall over when you try to click on something by touching it. I’m skeptical. I think a netbook or cheap laptop will continue to smoke the iPad for anybody who needs to type anything. Heck, you can add an external USB keyboard and a mouse to a netbook.

5. E-books with DRM. There is no mention of being able to use anything but EPUB format books. I’d like to be able to read things from Project Gutenberg, for example, or anything that an independent party might like to push out. Furthermore, it looks as if EPUB doesn’t work well for technical books or books that need precision graphics placement (comic books, for example).

6. No user-replaceable batteries, though it’s not a huge deal because you can charge just about anywhere. If their battery life figures aren’t inflated it should be enough for a day’s use. Plus, with a tablet I’m anticipating third-party form-fitting add-ons that boost battery life. I worry about wear on the battery, though — after a year or so of daily charging batteries lose significant capacity.

7. It is still tied to the draconian App Store policies. Apple still controls who can put what on this device, and their policies are not consumer-friendly. Take Google Voice as an example. Maybe Apple should watch their first commercial, “1984,” and see what their message was then.

8. No multitasking. On a real computing device you can switch between apps and not lose your place. I understand the implications for battery life and whatnot, but I’d like the option to quickly switch between apps, like an SSH client and a web browser, and keep my sessions.

Looking at Apple’s list of things they think the iPad can do better:

Browsing: netbooks for the win. A netbook has Flash and can run any web browser, not just the Apple-prescribed browser and technologies.

Email: netbooks for the win. The external keyboard is a kludge, not portable, and I’m guessing they added it because typing on the screen sucks.

Photos: I’ve changed this based on new information in the comments. I didn’t realize that the iPad had a camera connector, so I’ll dub this a tie. Netbooks are more flexible and can run more software packages, but the display & interface on the iPad will likely smoke a netbook’s. What does remain to be seen is if iPhoto or something like it will be ported to Windows. If that happens it’s iPad FTW.

Video: netbooks for the win. Aside from the lack of Flash on the iPad, which disables most Internet video players, you are only able to watch video encoded with Apple-prescribed codecs.

Music: iPad. The iPod is the standard, and the iPad will draw on that heritage.

Games: iPad. The games for the iPhone and iPad are so-so, but netbooks really don’t have the ability or interface to play anything.

eBooks: libraries for the win. A paperback book doesn’t take any power, can be read in many differing conditions, isn’t made of toxic waste, isn’t locked to a carrier, doesn’t have a monthly fee (though one would argue your library has a fee in the form of taxes), can be loaned to your cousin, is available at millions of locations, has an easy-to-use interface, can be dropped on the floor or crushed in your luggage, and can be donated to or borrowed from a library or a book swap when you’re done with it.

I think, for now, I’ll stick with a netbook and a paperback.

Popularity: 3% [?]

I have a Dell PowerEdge R610 in one of my VMware vSphere clusters that has been reporting memory errors. In fact, the machine wouldn’t boot, and the front panel suggested I reseat all the RAM. Okay…

0. Reseat all the RAM. Didn’t work, as expected.

1. Pull all twelve DIMMs out, put four back in. That worked, machine comes up.

2. Put four more DIMMs back. That worked, machine comes up.

3. Put last four DIMMs in. Machine doesn’t boot, same original error.

4. Pull last set of DIMMs out. Boot machine. Notice that BIOS is really old. Upgrade BIOS, thinking this is some stupid BIOS bug. Machine continues to boot.

5. Put last four DIMMs back in. New BIOS actually tells me what DIMMs are bad. Nice, except it says that A1 and A4 are bad. Two DIMMs? Yeah, not likely.

6. Order single replacement DIMM from Dell, decide to play Mastermind with RAM.

7. Replace DIMM A1. Machine switches to saying DIMMs B3 and B5 are bad. Really? DIMM banks B are on the other CPU.

8. Stifle disbelief, take loose DIMM from A1 and replace B3.

9. Machine switches to saying DIMM B5 is bad.

10. Take loose DIMM from B3 and replace B5. Machine likes that, has all of its RAM again, and I probably have the offending DIMM out now. Probably.

Lessons here: A) physical hardware sucks. B) linear troubleshooting rules. C) keep your firmware up to date.

Popularity: 1% [?]

“I’m filling out a survey. Can you tell me if we have a cloud?”

“Yes, we do,” I reply.

“We do?”

“Absolutely.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, I’d know — I built it.”

“You built it? No, I think the survey wants to know if we have a real cloud.” Well, thanks a lot.

“We do have a real cloud, and it’s the same one I’m talking about. In fact, we have two clouds, in two different locations. They’d probably be best described as ‘private clouds.’”

“Well, there isn’t an option for private clouds, so I’ll just say no.”

ARGGGH. Ten minutes pass…

“Hey, I’ve got another question. Do we use virtualization software?”

Popularity: 1% [?]

Dear people using the term “Y2K10,”

Please realize it’s actually one character longer and significantly more confusing than just typing “2010.” Yes, yes, I know it’s not nearly as hip and cool, but I’m sure you will survive. You may even come to appreciate using these commonly-understood terms when you notice an increase in your readership, due to suddenly being understandable.

Also, while we’re talking about years, please be aware that a new decade started on 1/1/2010, despite what you might have heard from people who don’t regularly remember that some numbering starts at zero. We may not have wanted, or remembered, them to be, but years 2000 to 2009 were actually ten (10) distinct years. Hence the ‘dec’ part of the word “decade.”

Lastly, Dave Hayden of Panic has a very informative post on blue moons and calendaring systems. Turns out that December 2009 did not have a blue moon, which was news to me.

Thank you for your attention to these matters.

:-)

Popularity: 1% [?]

A GoDaddy representative left a comment on the post about ipsCA, saying:

GoDaddy.com is happy to help ipsCA customers that have found themselves in a jam. For a limited time, our Standard SSLs are $12.99 with code sslqyh1w. Call 480-505-8877 or order online at http://bit.ly/91M3NV

I’m not usually the kind of person to parrot an ad, especially one left on my site, but it’s actually a decent deal if you want a new, real SSL cert. Admittedly it’s not for their advanced certificates, but if you have a couple of ipsCA certs to replace it might work out just fine. Personally, I’ve been quite happy with GoDaddy as a domain registrar.

Popularity: 2% [?]

So the SSL certification authority (CA) ipsCA is frantically sending out email because their root CA certificate will expire on 12/29/2009, and every customer of theirs needs to get a new certificate. This is a problem for my organization, because, being an educational institution we were able to get no-cost[0] SSL certs from them. Because they were no-cost we have a lot of these certificates for test & development systems, and are now scrambling to find what will break on December 29th.

Once we find all the certificates there’s another complicating factor. We could just renew the certificates again, but the new ipsCA root certificate is not shipping as part of any browsers except Internet Explorer 8 (the next Firefox will have it when it ships in February).  Since we know nobody ever patches anything[1] nearly every browser in circulation will continue to have errors. I can only conclude that ipsCA is being run by people who don’t understand their business.[2]

There are a few lessons here:

• Once again, free doesn’t mean it’s a good value. I’d much rather pay for a product I know will work well than have to babysit something that I paid nothing for. Though I’d be seriously upset if I were actually a paying customer of theirs.
• It would be real nice to have a central spreadsheet or tracking mechanism for SSL certificates and their expiration dates.
• It would also be nice to have all those SSL certificates co-terminate, so we can renew them all at once. Of course, we have an opportunity to do that now.
• For most test & development purposes an internal CA would work just fine, since it’s simple enough for staff to import a CA into their browsers. In fact, some of my coworkers have already set it up.

Let’s just hope these points don’t get lost in the chaos.

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[0] I say “no-cost” because it’s now obvious to a lot of people that they aren’t free.

[1] Except toolbars, things that install toolbars, and spyware.

[2] That’s probably the most polite I’ve been when describing this situation.

Popularity: 3% [?]

You think that server in our data center is yours?

The CIO paid for it.

The logistics & purchasing team ordered it.

The data center team installed it.

The system administration team configured it and patch it.

You installed the application on it.

The monitoring guys watch it.

The security team scans it.

I think it’s safe to say it belongs to the whole organization, not you.

Popularity: 1% [?]

If you’re a student, or faculty/staff at an educational institution, and have need for CAD software you might check to see if you’re eligible for a free copy of Nemetschek Vectorworks.

I don’t know much about it yet, but I’m hoping to use it for some of the lighting designs I do. Seems pretty powerful, in the 20 minutes I’ve been using it, and I know a number of people who use it for a lot of things.

Popularity: 1% [?]